I've been trying to write a coherent reply, but slashdot's new piece of shit comment system has lost the last three I wrote. The short, short version: twitter ~ Macthorpe ~ inTheLoo ~ gnutoo. 8/9 threads Macthorpe comments in, the others do. 8/13 for inTheLoo, 5/10 for gnutoo, 9/18 for twitter. Slashdot has half a million users and only a few hundred post in any given thread - this is extremely unlikely to be a chance occurence. Just throwing the data out there...
Games that require detailed input will never run on consoles. Can you imagine trying to play Civilization, SimCity, Alpha Centauri, or most other sim/strategy games on a console?
Let's wait until more than 16/90 votes are in before pronouncing doom, gloom, and woe unto the world. Care to imagine how much big tobacco spent fighting the trials that ended in them being fined, what, $100 billion?
That being said... You only have to lie once and all future statements you make are tainted by doubt. The question has moved beyond ODF vs OOXML but to ISO itself. The ISO is like a bank in that their product is trust. The same way I trust the bank to hold my money, I'm supposed to trust that things certified by ISO deserve to have been certified. But if this passes, how can I do that? How can ISO survive in the face of having allowed itself and it's processes to be so transparently perverted? And not just by anyone, but by a known abusive monopolist which has proven for over twenty years that there is no lie it won't tell and no back it won't stab to get it's way?
I trust that buying film & photo paper whose boxes are labelled "ISO 9001 Certified" means I'm getting a well-made product. How can I trust any ISO standards after this? If this happens, Microsoft will truly be the destroyer of standards.
Yes. The upper limit of the LHC, using heavy ions like lead, is on the order of 10^15eV in a collision. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays can have energies of 10^20eV and higher, far beyond anything we will ever be able to create on Earth, and yet we're alive.
When they build a particle accelerator out of the asteroid belt, call me and we can panic together:)
Compared to fossil fuel technologies, how can you claim nuclear isn't clean? It doesn't kill tens of thousands of people per year due to particulate pollution and it doesn't spew tens of tons of U and Th ash into the atmosphere every year. Nuclear power from properly designed reactors is about as clean as you can get. 1/100 the amount of waste, with a needed isolation time of centuries rather than eons, and full utilization of the fuel's potential rather than the pitiful 2-5% acheived by most present reactors. Thanks to the fuel-efficiency aspect, we have millenia of fuel even if all the world's power were generated by such reactors.
Is fission power perfect? Hell no. I have a mid-1960's encyclopedia set which eagerly announces that fusion power will be here in 10 or 20 years and solve our problems. Unfortunately, the catastrophic environmental and sociological effects of continued fossil fuel depletion are happening right now. We can't wait another 50 years for the holy grail of fusion power - we need a stopgap right now to bridge the gap between now and whenever fusion power is made workable. As enthusiastic as I am about it, solar power just won't cut it due to variability. Wind power has the same problems. Anywhere it's workable to build a hydroelectric dam we've already built one.
Fission reactors are the only technology with a proven ability to meet real-world electric demands, without any tricks or expensive storage, that can be done right now. Don't let an obsession with perfection blind you to the fact that we need something that's merely good before we get to perfection!
The main point of TrueCrypt (as I understand it) being that it's impossible for the prosecution to provide any evidence that what they see isn't everything you've got. No evidence you aren't complying = no leg to stand on.
Me? I'd keep anything "they" are after on a mini-sd card (hell, they're so small you can almost legitimately claim that you lost it). If all else fails and you get a suprise warrant at 3am, you could even stick it up your ass as a last resort. As long as you don't do something stupid like put the card in/etc/fstab or (more likely) fail to scrub/tmp before powerdown you win: There is no evidence what so ever that the files in question were ever present.
Do you seriously believe that President Gore or President Kerry would have initiated/continued the kind of blatant attacks on the rule of law & accountability that are so characteristic of the Bush administration? Would they have debased our ability to claim any moral high ground by condoning and supporting torture? Would they have used "national security" as a cover to try and build a corporate-sponsored surveillance state? Would they madly cling to policies under the banner of "stay the course," no matter how horribly and obviously wrong those policies were or turned out to be? Name the last Democratic president who said in an interview that this would be a lot easier in a dictatorship if he were the dictator.
The Democrats are no better than Bush? Then why is it Bush, and the party which routinely condemns "tax-and-spend liberals" and trumpets itself as the bringer of small government and fiscal responsibility, the one which has in 8 years saddled us and our children with more debt than every other president combined, and doubled the size of the federal budget whose cancerous growth he and the Republicans so vehemently denounce?
Neither party is at all better than the other? Since when have the Democrats proclaimed themselves to be the sole beacon of light, Moral Decency, and the Traditional American Family in the smothering night of evil secularism, only for one Democrat after another to turn out to be those gays or adulterers whom they so ardently and stridently insist are going to be the downfall of America?
What Democratic or Republican president before Bush has taken that fabled shining city upon a hill, and desecrated it such that his supporter's defense in a debate is no longer "Because we are better than they are," but "We aren't the worst human rights violator on Earth?"
No, the Democrats have a very long way to go before they are as bad as Bush has been, for both his party and the nation.
Make a roaring bluster about this and then fold like wet paper tigers when it comes time to put up or shut up..
Do you want to know why Bushco thinks it's above the law? Because until you fucking cowards grow a goddamn spine and stand up to their evil, corrosive attitude towards the rule of law THEY ARE.
Why is it that in 8 years, I have never, EVER heard of a major Democrat standing up and saying outright, without analogy, subtlety or tact, that thanks to Bush the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams? That thanks to him, 19 insane religious fanatics have gone from "attacked three buildings and got their organization crushed like a bug for it's trouble" to "shook the rule of law, the foundation of the most powerful country in the world, to it's base?" That thanks to him and the Republican fear machine, bin Laden has changed and hurt American society in ways he never could have dreamed of? That thanks to him, the terrorists have won in every way that matters?
You're looking even farther out than I am. I was drooling over the idea of computer overlays on our main input senses; You're talking about having computer overlays on the body itself, the "outputs." Then it gets even MORE interesting.
Try to imagine what it would be like if you had a subsentient system that could drive your body while your mind was free. The professor and his entire quantum physics class go out for their usual five mile run, while in the mind's eye they hover in front of glowing differential equations in a shared virtual-space facilitated by the mesh network formed between their cranium-embedded wireless networking gear. Half an hour later they are informed that the run is finished and return to an overlay of realspace...
Consider the social consequences, if I can have my body go out, keep itself in excellent physical condition, do my household tasks, and rent the remaining time to whoever wants it while my mind curls up with a nice book, or a math research project, or cybersex, or anything. The moral dilemna of what to do with irreemable psychopaths and criminals is solved; Lock them in up in a fantasy of their choice. Imagine what will happen to legal defenses; "I swear, when I rented my body out to *** I had no idea they'd make it kill someone! I'm innocent!" Will it be illegal to rent your body's time out to the wrong group?
The most pessimistic scenarios are so horrible I can't even think about them without shuddering. The most optimistic scenario is a prompt technological singularity; Everyone is saved from mind-crushing work and freed to work on their intellectual and artistic endeavors. An inevitably large group gravitates towards running consciousness in a computer with no biological substrate. When success is acheived, the speed of cognition becomes almost unbounded as we are freed from a substrate based on a 30Hz master clock. What happens then depends on the relation of sentience to computing power in the comp-sci sense. If there is a Turing machine of cognition capable of solving any problem no matter it's scope and depth given long enough to think, it seems likely humans are in this class (given the ability of the same brain structure to work with every climate and culture on earth). As the singularity occurs, sentiences thinking at rates millions or billions of times faster than ordinary people explode ahead, but none the less remain more or less human when it comes down to how they think. If on the other hand a sentience's ability to solve complex problems is a function of it's "complexity"/depth/parallelism of thought, the singularity would involve an explosion of beings that recursively increased their complexity to solve ever grander questions and problems, and normal humans would be left entirely unable to ever comprehend the answers or even meaningfully communicate with them.
Well, I've definitely gone off on an off-topic fantasy. But I wonder... if the second scenario is true, would a true singularity even be possible? As any intelligence running on a Turing machine is limited to the abilities of a Turing machine, no matter how complex an intelligence might make itself there would always be problems forever beyond it's reach (a general integral of any continuous function) unless a hypercomputer were created. Or would the Singularity represent intelligence striving to come ever closer to solving every problem that can be solved?
Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford... No wonder I'm a little crazy.
If using the mouse hurts your wrist, get a trackman. They're awesome. Plus, you can turn down your pointer acceleration and still conserve a lot of space since you don't need to move anything but your thumb.
In any case, there's something even more important than having display glasses let you use your computer while mobile: This is a major step towards augmented reality. We can do the visual overlay with some effort, and the audio overlay is as simple as a mic & headphones. But this is what will enable you to do something in virtual reality without appearing to be in a trance. Just fucking think about that for a second. Don't like your home decor? Think your way through the menus and *poof,* new decor is overlaid on your walls - no pesky laws of physics attached either. Instead of talking into a block, you talk to your friend's avatar right in front of you (which is copying your friend's facial expressions to boot). Teleconference? Telepresence. You'd never get lost again - stick a GPS card into your laptop and overlay a line leading you to your destination in your vision. Designing something? Have the design hover in front of you, see how it fits in.
I mean, augmented reality is pretty much the next best thing before the Singularity. Imagine living at the intersection of two realities, physical and cyber. An LCOS display in your glasses overlays the cyber world (however you wish to perceive it) onto a video feed captured by stereo cameras mounted on the rims. A next-generation cochlear implant overlays sounds from your computer - pings about new e-mails, new aim info, new searches, new news - straight into your mind. My book hovers in front of me and flips the page when my eyes reach the last line.
I had a thought about how to fight spam (Yet Another Idea!).
In short, the problem is that currently email operates as data-push from arbitrary locations to arbitrary destinations. This enables any asshole with bandwidth to carpetbomb the destination-space.
Now suppose a service were added that will vouch for the sender's legitimacy, thereby eliminating the "arbitrary from" half. From the user's perspective, they simply have to locate an email vouching service (hopefully one will be suggested when they create an email account) and register their email with the service. Depending on the user's settings, if the voucher rates the sender as x/N or less the email is canned. If the user thinks it's spam, he hits a button that tells the given voucher/reputation server that sender Q did something bad.
On the admin side, the network of vouchers is decentralized and community-run. After you confirm IRL (i.e. you give contact info) that you are 'good,' you can join your server to the network. Servers exchange lists of addresses and status changes on those addresses (reputation up/down, deleted, etc) between each other via encrypted Bittorrent on a regular basis such that state-coherency is maintained. At regular intervals, a single server would be chosen to receive all updates from the others (possibly percholating up a high fan-in hierarchy), compile a master state-delta, and seed it on the Bittorrent.
To prevent spammers from being able to run their own malicious servers, when the user registers their address with the real network they are given a list of all legitimate servers in the network. If an email's voucher is not on the list, the mail is automatically dropped. To deal with forgery of the from: field is a bit harder. When registering, the voucher exchanges keys with the given mailserver. When a mailserver gets an email, it queries the voucher about it and gives the address & sender. The voucher then challenges the mailserver to send a short encrypted message - if the voucher can't decrypt it, the sender was forged and the mail is dropped. If the sender wasn't forged but has a poor reputation, the user's client will drop the mail. In short, the plan is to sidestep the problem of trusting the sender by having a trusted third party vouch for him.
This will cut off spam in every way. You can't have your spambots forge addresses (because they lack the key, known only to the address's real mailserver & the vouchers), you can't have them register their own (because these will be marked and dropped immediately due to the volume of garbage they pump out). That leaves only legitimate users whose mail client is compromised by malware. This problem will solve itself, because this system will create consequences that only the end user can deal with: You let your box get compromised again? No one can help you. Get a new account and stop fucking up. When people are forced to deal with the consequences of stupidity (unlike how dumbass users avoid the responsibility of dealing with their box after opening a virus-mail today by hassling us nerds presently), they will eventually stop being stupid in this small way.
In response to the inevitable "Your post advocates..." reply: First of all, die in a fire - If you can spend the time to go through filling in [X] in that bit of copypasta, you can write your own sentences like I wrote mine. Second, no, it does not require everyone's immediate cooperation. It could be gradually phased in with an "activate vouching" button on the user's side, and mailservers would be perfectly fine with not querying the voucher-servers. Of course, the advantages would be large enough that the situation would quickly become such that no one would accept mail without a voucher, but that's the point. Third, you should trust this server network because it's run openly.
The only problem I forsee is temporary - the original servers will need to have an absolutely astounding amount of bandwidth to deal with assured spammer retaliation. Once the system goes online and becomes the dominant way of doing email, spam dies and their revenue dies and their ability to buy time on botnets dies.
AFAIK, the highest speeds on a single fiber are 10Gbps, which would make this a bundle of 768 fibers (which would make sense in accordance with things involving computers commonly involving powers of 2 & 3).
You were paying far too much attention to the parts about how well the free market works and far too little when the professor described the underlying mathematical assumptions on which the pareto-optimality is based. Like "all households and firms are omniscient about the status of the market" and "the barrier to market entry is zero" and "all firms are in perfect competition/no one has market power."
So you see how the free market model might tend to break down when one or two known-abusive firms in a given area actively work against all three of those conditions.
2/3 of all malware distribution sites & sites that link to them are hosted in China.
The next worst offender is the US with 1/6.
About 3.5M websites attempt to send you to exploits from 180K distribution sites.
63% of the 180K malicious sites are IIS, 33% are Apache, and a handful are other.
80% of malware from not in ads (e.g. iframes) was within 4 redirects of the malware distributor.
80% of malware from ads was more than 4 redirects from the distributor.
3/4 of distribution sites and 1/2 of landing sites are in 2 blocks occupying 6.5% of IP4.
Among drive-by downloads, 1/2 alter your startup, 1/3 attack your security, 1/4 corrupt your preferences, and 7% install BHOs.
87% of outbound connections the malware initiates are HTTP, 8.3% are IRC.
The three AV engines tested against malware retrieved by the study had detection rates of about 35, 50, and 70%.
The part I find scariest is the 3.5M malware fronts. I mean, there are only about 70M active hosts on the entire Internet - that's 5 percent! Since I think that trying to make programmers these days write secure code is a lost cause, we should focus on breaking up the software monoculture. This kind of shit really starts to lose it's efficacy if only 1/4 or 1/5 attempts even attack the right browser...
I really, truly wish you should be thrown before the millions of Americans who died to give you the freedom to vote and asked to explain why you're pissing away what they sacrificed for you.
The only bomb that generates a country-sized EMP is a nuclear weapon detonated between the stratosphere and the ionosphere. Seeing as China would respond to a nuclear attack on them in kind, everyone loses.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to write a coherent reply, but slashdot's new piece of shit comment system has lost the last three I wrote. The short, short version: twitter ~ Macthorpe ~ inTheLoo ~ gnutoo. 8/9 threads Macthorpe comments in, the others do. 8/13 for inTheLoo, 5/10 for gnutoo, 9/18 for twitter. Slashdot has half a million users and only a few hundred post in any given thread - this is extremely unlikely to be a chance occurence. Just throwing the data out there...
Stopping stupid humans' stupidity from hurting them requires human-equivalent AI (to do everything on their behalf).
How do you protect someone who actually believes that there's a prince in Nigeria who wants to wire him/her millions of dollars?
Games that require detailed input will never run on consoles. Can you imagine trying to play Civilization, SimCity, Alpha Centauri, or most other sim/strategy games on a console?
Let's wait until more than 16/90 votes are in before pronouncing doom, gloom, and woe unto the world. Care to imagine how much big tobacco spent fighting the trials that ended in them being fined, what, $100 billion?
That being said... You only have to lie once and all future statements you make are tainted by doubt. The question has moved beyond ODF vs OOXML but to ISO itself. The ISO is like a bank in that their product is trust. The same way I trust the bank to hold my money, I'm supposed to trust that things certified by ISO deserve to have been certified. But if this passes, how can I do that? How can ISO survive in the face of having allowed itself and it's processes to be so transparently perverted? And not just by anyone, but by a known abusive monopolist which has proven for over twenty years that there is no lie it won't tell and no back it won't stab to get it's way?
I trust that buying film & photo paper whose boxes are labelled "ISO 9001 Certified" means I'm getting a well-made product. How can I trust any ISO standards after this? If this happens, Microsoft will truly be the destroyer of standards.
Yes. The upper limit of the LHC, using heavy ions like lead, is on the order of 10^15eV in a collision. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays can have energies of 10^20eV and higher, far beyond anything we will ever be able to create on Earth, and yet we're alive.
:)
When they build a particle accelerator out of the asteroid belt, call me and we can panic together
Compared to fossil fuel technologies, how can you claim nuclear isn't clean? It doesn't kill tens of thousands of people per year due to particulate pollution and it doesn't spew tens of tons of U and Th ash into the atmosphere every year. Nuclear power from properly designed reactors is about as clean as you can get. 1/100 the amount of waste, with a needed isolation time of centuries rather than eons, and full utilization of the fuel's potential rather than the pitiful 2-5% acheived by most present reactors. Thanks to the fuel-efficiency aspect, we have millenia of fuel even if all the world's power were generated by such reactors.
Is fission power perfect? Hell no. I have a mid-1960's encyclopedia set which eagerly announces that fusion power will be here in 10 or 20 years and solve our problems. Unfortunately, the catastrophic environmental and sociological effects of continued fossil fuel depletion are happening right now. We can't wait another 50 years for the holy grail of fusion power - we need a stopgap right now to bridge the gap between now and whenever fusion power is made workable. As enthusiastic as I am about it, solar power just won't cut it due to variability. Wind power has the same problems. Anywhere it's workable to build a hydroelectric dam we've already built one.
Fission reactors are the only technology with a proven ability to meet real-world electric demands, without any tricks or expensive storage, that can be done right now. Don't let an obsession with perfection blind you to the fact that we need something that's merely good before we get to perfection!
The main point of TrueCrypt (as I understand it) being that it's impossible for the prosecution to provide any evidence that what they see isn't everything you've got. No evidence you aren't complying = no leg to stand on.
/etc/fstab or (more likely) fail to scrub /tmp before powerdown you win: There is no evidence what so ever that the files in question were ever present.
Me? I'd keep anything "they" are after on a mini-sd card (hell, they're so small you can almost legitimately claim that you lost it). If all else fails and you get a suprise warrant at 3am, you could even stick it up your ass as a last resort. As long as you don't do something stupid like put the card in
You didn't answer any of my questions, but reiterated that you refuse to admit to the existence of a continuum of gray between black and white.
To every complex question, there is an answer that is simple, concise, and wrong - paraphrase of H.L. Mencken.
Do you seriously believe that President Gore or President Kerry would have initiated/continued the kind of blatant attacks on the rule of law & accountability that are so characteristic of the Bush administration? Would they have debased our ability to claim any moral high ground by condoning and supporting torture? Would they have used "national security" as a cover to try and build a corporate-sponsored surveillance state? Would they madly cling to policies under the banner of "stay the course," no matter how horribly and obviously wrong those policies were or turned out to be? Name the last Democratic president who said in an interview that this would be a lot easier in a dictatorship if he were the dictator.
The Democrats are no better than Bush? Then why is it Bush, and the party which routinely condemns "tax-and-spend liberals" and trumpets itself as the bringer of small government and fiscal responsibility, the one which has in 8 years saddled us and our children with more debt than every other president combined, and doubled the size of the federal budget whose cancerous growth he and the Republicans so vehemently denounce?
Neither party is at all better than the other? Since when have the Democrats proclaimed themselves to be the sole beacon of light, Moral Decency, and the Traditional American Family in the smothering night of evil secularism, only for one Democrat after another to turn out to be those gays or adulterers whom they so ardently and stridently insist are going to be the downfall of America?
What Democratic or Republican president before Bush has taken that fabled shining city upon a hill, and desecrated it such that his supporter's defense in a debate is no longer "Because we are better than they are," but "We aren't the worst human rights violator on Earth?"
No, the Democrats have a very long way to go before they are as bad as Bush has been, for both his party and the nation.
Make a roaring bluster about this and then fold like wet paper tigers when it comes time to put up or shut up..
Do you want to know why Bushco thinks it's above the law? Because until you fucking cowards grow a goddamn spine and stand up to their evil, corrosive attitude towards the rule of law THEY ARE.
Why is it that in 8 years, I have never, EVER heard of a major Democrat standing up and saying outright, without analogy, subtlety or tact, that thanks to Bush the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams? That thanks to him, 19 insane religious fanatics have gone from "attacked three buildings and got their organization crushed like a bug for it's trouble" to "shook the rule of law, the foundation of the most powerful country in the world, to it's base?" That thanks to him and the Republican fear machine, bin Laden has changed and hurt American society in ways he never could have dreamed of? That thanks to him, the terrorists have won in every way that matters?
You're looking even farther out than I am. I was drooling over the idea of computer overlays on our main input senses; You're talking about having computer overlays on the body itself, the "outputs." Then it gets even MORE interesting.
Try to imagine what it would be like if you had a subsentient system that could drive your body while your mind was free. The professor and his entire quantum physics class go out for their usual five mile run, while in the mind's eye they hover in front of glowing differential equations in a shared virtual-space facilitated by the mesh network formed between their cranium-embedded wireless networking gear. Half an hour later they are informed that the run is finished and return to an overlay of realspace...
Consider the social consequences, if I can have my body go out, keep itself in excellent physical condition, do my household tasks, and rent the remaining time to whoever wants it while my mind curls up with a nice book, or a math research project, or cybersex, or anything. The moral dilemna of what to do with irreemable psychopaths and criminals is solved; Lock them in up in a fantasy of their choice. Imagine what will happen to legal defenses; "I swear, when I rented my body out to *** I had no idea they'd make it kill someone! I'm innocent!" Will it be illegal to rent your body's time out to the wrong group?
The most pessimistic scenarios are so horrible I can't even think about them without shuddering. The most optimistic scenario is a prompt technological singularity; Everyone is saved from mind-crushing work and freed to work on their intellectual and artistic endeavors. An inevitably large group gravitates towards running consciousness in a computer with no biological substrate. When success is acheived, the speed of cognition becomes almost unbounded as we are freed from a substrate based on a 30Hz master clock. What happens then depends on the relation of sentience to computing power in the comp-sci sense. If there is a Turing machine of cognition capable of solving any problem no matter it's scope and depth given long enough to think, it seems likely humans are in this class (given the ability of the same brain structure to work with every climate and culture on earth). As the singularity occurs, sentiences thinking at rates millions or billions of times faster than ordinary people explode ahead, but none the less remain more or less human when it comes down to how they think. If on the other hand a sentience's ability to solve complex problems is a function of it's "complexity"/depth/parallelism of thought, the singularity would involve an explosion of beings that recursively increased their complexity to solve ever grander questions and problems, and normal humans would be left entirely unable to ever comprehend the answers or even meaningfully communicate with them.
Well, I've definitely gone off on an off-topic fantasy. But I wonder... if the second scenario is true, would a true singularity even be possible? As any intelligence running on a Turing machine is limited to the abilities of a Turing machine, no matter how complex an intelligence might make itself there would always be problems forever beyond it's reach (a general integral of any continuous function) unless a hypercomputer were created. Or would the Singularity represent intelligence striving to come ever closer to solving every problem that can be solved?
Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford... No wonder I'm a little crazy.
If using the mouse hurts your wrist, get a trackman. They're awesome. Plus, you can turn down your pointer acceleration and still conserve a lot of space since you don't need to move anything but your thumb.
In any case, there's something even more important than having display glasses let you use your computer while mobile: This is a major step towards augmented reality. We can do the visual overlay with some effort, and the audio overlay is as simple as a mic & headphones. But this is what will enable you to do something in virtual reality without appearing to be in a trance. Just fucking think about that for a second. Don't like your home decor? Think your way through the menus and *poof,* new decor is overlaid on your walls - no pesky laws of physics attached either. Instead of talking into a block, you talk to your friend's avatar right in front of you (which is copying your friend's facial expressions to boot). Teleconference? Telepresence. You'd never get lost again - stick a GPS card into your laptop and overlay a line leading you to your destination in your vision. Designing something? Have the design hover in front of you, see how it fits in.
I mean, augmented reality is pretty much the next best thing before the Singularity. Imagine living at the intersection of two realities, physical and cyber. An LCOS display in your glasses overlays the cyber world (however you wish to perceive it) onto a video feed captured by stereo cameras mounted on the rims. A next-generation cochlear implant overlays sounds from your computer - pings about new e-mails, new aim info, new searches, new news - straight into your mind. My book hovers in front of me and flips the page when my eyes reach the last line.
This is incomprehensibly awesome.
I had a thought about how to fight spam (Yet Another Idea!).
In short, the problem is that currently email operates as data-push from arbitrary locations to arbitrary destinations. This enables any asshole with bandwidth to carpetbomb the destination-space.
Now suppose a service were added that will vouch for the sender's legitimacy, thereby eliminating the "arbitrary from" half. From the user's perspective, they simply have to locate an email vouching service (hopefully one will be suggested when they create an email account) and register their email with the service. Depending on the user's settings, if the voucher rates the sender as x/N or less the email is canned. If the user thinks it's spam, he hits a button that tells the given voucher/reputation server that sender Q did something bad.
On the admin side, the network of vouchers is decentralized and community-run. After you confirm IRL (i.e. you give contact info) that you are 'good,' you can join your server to the network. Servers exchange lists of addresses and status changes on those addresses (reputation up/down, deleted, etc) between each other via encrypted Bittorrent on a regular basis such that state-coherency is maintained. At regular intervals, a single server would be chosen to receive all updates from the others (possibly percholating up a high fan-in hierarchy), compile a master state-delta, and seed it on the Bittorrent.
To prevent spammers from being able to run their own malicious servers, when the user registers their address with the real network they are given a list of all legitimate servers in the network. If an email's voucher is not on the list, the mail is automatically dropped. To deal with forgery of the from: field is a bit harder. When registering, the voucher exchanges keys with the given mailserver. When a mailserver gets an email, it queries the voucher about it and gives the address & sender. The voucher then challenges the mailserver to send a short encrypted message - if the voucher can't decrypt it, the sender was forged and the mail is dropped. If the sender wasn't forged but has a poor reputation, the user's client will drop the mail. In short, the plan is to sidestep the problem of trusting the sender by having a trusted third party vouch for him.
This will cut off spam in every way. You can't have your spambots forge addresses (because they lack the key, known only to the address's real mailserver & the vouchers), you can't have them register their own (because these will be marked and dropped immediately due to the volume of garbage they pump out). That leaves only legitimate users whose mail client is compromised by malware. This problem will solve itself, because this system will create consequences that only the end user can deal with: You let your box get compromised again? No one can help you. Get a new account and stop fucking up. When people are forced to deal with the consequences of stupidity (unlike how dumbass users avoid the responsibility of dealing with their box after opening a virus-mail today by hassling us nerds presently), they will eventually stop being stupid in this small way.
In response to the inevitable "Your post advocates..." reply: First of all, die in a fire - If you can spend the time to go through filling in [X] in that bit of copypasta, you can write your own sentences like I wrote mine. Second, no, it does not require everyone's immediate cooperation. It could be gradually phased in with an "activate vouching" button on the user's side, and mailservers would be perfectly fine with not querying the voucher-servers. Of course, the advantages would be large enough that the situation would quickly become such that no one would accept mail without a voucher, but that's the point. Third, you should trust this server network because it's run openly.
The only problem I forsee is temporary - the original servers will need to have an absolutely astounding amount of bandwidth to deal with assured spammer retaliation. Once the system goes online and becomes the dominant way of doing email, spam dies and their revenue dies and their ability to buy time on botnets dies.
So, would it work?
If it has to do with quarks and it takes a supercomputer, I'd guess a lattice QCD simulation.
I wonder if it does that every time...
AFAIK, the highest speeds on a single fiber are 10Gbps, which would make this a bundle of 768 fibers (which would make sense in accordance with things involving computers commonly involving powers of 2 & 3).
IANAIE (internet engineer) though.
Don't forget the corollary, that a liberal will become a conservative in 30-40 years without changing a single idea.
Admitting that you are correct implicitly requires them to accept that they are wrong.
If you truly think you have nothing to hide, you must lead a terribly boring life.
Holy shit, you mean it can solve the halting problem for Turing machines? Awesome!
Star Trek 5 sucks worse than ST: Nemesis?
You were paying far too much attention to the parts about how well the free market works and far too little when the professor described the underlying mathematical assumptions on which the pareto-optimality is based. Like "all households and firms are omniscient about the status of the market" and "the barrier to market entry is zero" and "all firms are in perfect competition/no one has market power."
/My state-enforced monopoly, let me show you it!
So you see how the free market model might tend to break down when one or two known-abusive firms in a given area actively work against all three of those conditions.
2/3 of all malware distribution sites & sites that link to them are hosted in China.
The next worst offender is the US with 1/6.
About 3.5M websites attempt to send you to exploits from 180K distribution sites.
63% of the 180K malicious sites are IIS, 33% are Apache, and a handful are other.
80% of malware from not in ads (e.g. iframes) was within 4 redirects of the malware distributor.
80% of malware from ads was more than 4 redirects from the distributor.
3/4 of distribution sites and 1/2 of landing sites are in 2 blocks occupying 6.5% of IP4.
Among drive-by downloads, 1/2 alter your startup, 1/3 attack your security, 1/4 corrupt your preferences, and 7% install BHOs.
87% of outbound connections the malware initiates are HTTP, 8.3% are IRC.
The three AV engines tested against malware retrieved by the study had detection rates of about 35, 50, and 70%.
The part I find scariest is the 3.5M malware fronts. I mean, there are only about 70M active hosts on the entire Internet - that's 5 percent! Since I think that trying to make programmers these days write secure code is a lost cause, we should focus on breaking up the software monoculture. This kind of shit really starts to lose it's efficacy if only 1/4 or 1/5 attempts even attack the right browser...
I really, truly wish you should be thrown before the millions of Americans who died to give you the freedom to vote and asked to explain why you're pissing away what they sacrificed for you.
The only bomb that generates a country-sized EMP is a nuclear weapon detonated between the stratosphere and the ionosphere. Seeing as China would respond to a nuclear attack on them in kind, everyone loses.